With the Pumpkin, Of Course

My mom skipped a lunch with her girlfriends today to watch Cian in his 10-minute long Halloween parade. She then, despite my not-so-forceful protests, whisked him away so that I could go home and focus on writing (more on that later–let’s just say that this writer mama is working hard). I admit that I got a little teary. It could be lack of sleep. It could be from being overwhelmed. It could be that crying a little is my usual reaction to someone showing me kindness. But as we were switching cars outside of my son’s school, she looked at me: “Do you want to cook with a pumpkin?”

I squinted at her. “Huh?’ And she handed me a pumpkin. It was this huge thing meant for cooking, grown by a friend of hers, and my Mom had happily taken it from her to pass along to me. If you don’t know how much I love a pumpkin, there you go. I may have hugged it.

And then, as if my day weren’t already made (the little things), she slipped me a bottle of wine, wrapped up in a paper bag, right there in the school parking lot. “I was in the PX and I’m not sure what kind of red you like, but here you go.” So I stood there, in that school parking lot, within sight of the big brick church that anchors the other end of that stretch of macadam, hugging my pumpkin and bottle of wine to my chest and trying not to get weirdly teary as she kissed me goodbye and drove off, back to her home a half-hour away, to watch Cian for a bit, to later pick up my girls back at that same spot, to later then take them all to gymnastics practice, so that I can write. So that I can keep writing.